For those of you who have traveled to Lyon and resented taking the Satobus shuttle buses from Lyon St. Exupéry Airport to downtown Lyon, you now have a more modern alternative that gets you downtown (Gare Part Dieu, the main train station) in under 30 minutes. You can read an article in French about this here in Le Point.

Rhônexpress is the name of the brand new system, and you can find out more from its website, in French. Soon you will be able to buy tickets online.

The line is 22km (13.7 miles) long, it shares part of its track with the T3 tramway of the urban network TCL, it reaches a speed of 100km/hr (about 60 mph) and each of its 6 cars can hold up to 76 passengers. The tram-train will run from 5am to midnight, with service every 15 minutes.

As the article mentions, the ticket price will be higher than the 8.90€ for one-way Satobus; a one-way ticket costs 13€ (round-trip 23€), but if you buy a booklet of 6 tickets, the individual ticket price goes down to 11€. There are discounts being discussed at the moment for students and families (as is the norm for most transport), maybe free for under-12, as well as special rates for a combo TCL-Rhônexpress card, and possibly an SNCF-Rhônexpress card or rates. As for a combined rate for flight-Rhônexpress, however, that is less feasible, as the article highlights, because in case one or the other is late, there would be disagreements about reimbursing passengers based on responsibility.

This article quotes authorities of the project who expect to have 1 million passengers in the service’s first year. You can also read a background article in English here.

In any case, this is a welcome addition to the Lyon transport landscape, and I know I’ll be happy to take it.

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